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To: user@pivot.apache.org
Subject: Re: Compatibility breaks between pivot versions.
Reply-To: slb@sergelebreton.com
References: <op.u7bd0tni3gturz@slb>
 <C043EE34-EE3F-4115-B737-D5C5397165D4@mac.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:37:18 +1300
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From: "Serge Le Breton" <slb@sergelebreton.com>
Message-ID: <op.u7blcgrk3gturz@slb>
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Greg,

Thank you for the answer. I've followed the user@pivot.apache.org for a while and I like your responsiveness.
It makes me feel confident as a new user of pivot.

I completely agree with the "getting the API right" philosophy.
The project is young and full of potential and no genius on earth can make it right the first time.
.Net doesn't. It pretty much breaks compatibility every major X release.
Scala doesn't either.
Java didn't, but ends up with a cluttered API and a soooooo long javadoc full of deprecated annotations.

A DTD will definitively help. Especially for an IDE (auto-completion, typing validation etc..)

Anyway, I'm going to write my own <checkWTKX> Ant task and add it in my compile target. I think it's a good idea. Just to be sure.

Cheers, and keep up the good work.

BTW: anyone on your team working on a GUI/WTKX designer tool?

/Serge


On Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:44:31 +1300, Greg Brown <gkbrown@mac.com> wrote:

> Hi Serge,
>
> We have historically made API changes across releases that have broken backwards compatibility, particularly during our incubation as the platform evolved. We believe that "getting the API right" is very important and can sometimes outweigh the benefits of maintaining backward compatibility. However, as our user base grows, we will be more conscious of the impact such changes will have and will ensure that breaking API changes are adequately documented in our release notes.
>
> An Ant task that verifies WTKX validity is an interesting idea - another option we have discussed is providing a DTD to validate the XML structure. This is currently on the table for Pivot 1.4.2.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Greg
>
>
> On Jan 29, 2010, at 4:59 PM, Serge Le Breton wrote:
>
>> Hi to the team of pivot,
>>
>> First of all, congratulations for this nice piece of software.
>> I like the Terra Look&Feel and the API design (static inner classes)
>> I'm coming from Swing and my notepad is full of questions I'd like to ask
>> but I start with a nontechnical one.
>>
>> I've started a project with pivot 1.3. A few weeks later 1.4 was released.
>> 1.4 broke my compilation and my runtime because of missing classes,
>> properties and styles keys etc...
>> Well, I don't mind -too much- compilation errors but the problem is runtime
>> errors with the WTKX serializer.
>> So before I start making an Ant task that grabs all my wtkx files and run
>> the serializer on them to look for errors -which I might do anyway- I'd
>> like to know:
>>
>> Do you plan to continue breaking backward compatibility in future
>> releases? If so, anyway to have a 'breaking log' of some sort with a new release?
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>>
>> /Serge.
>
>